My first Slr camera was the Olympus OM1 (I still have it) it is a fantastic camera. It is reasonably lightweight and fully manual, I used it avidly for portraits of my kids, my life, for college, through Uni, for weddings for everything. It was reliable and easy to use I had great results from it. It is now over 30 years old and I can still pick it up and use it with ease. It has many features and many lens (which were reasonably priced). Having complete control over exposure, shutter, aperture had me using all my photographic knowledge of these things to produce some excellent results. Even now i read situations in manual mode, looking at light, thinking of exposure, apertures etc... It became second nature to focus and set the exposure i wanted very quickly especially when working with children.
One of the features is the ability to do double triple or more exposures on one frame (it's 35mm) which was great fun! Seriously I used this feature to produce a ghost like shot of my daughter, another feature was the abilty to leave the shutter open (B setting) and let the camera record my daughter moving slowly away from me, the result was brilliant! It appeared that she was morphing from me!
Anyway i digress, my Olympus OM1 camera was ideal, even in a world where of Nikon and Canon dominated the photography scene, it was used in astrophotography, scientific- medical and even by famous photographers ( David Bailey).
After many years of using my old Olympus I finally moved into the digital age. I had used a compact digital with some good results (way back in 2005) and wanted to try out the Pro SLR Digital. So in 2006 I finally bought a digital SLR, ironically the Olympus available did not make the grade, they were slow in the development of the pro digital Slr and I went for the Konica Minolta Dynax 7d.
Why?
Because after spending considerable time reading reviews and trying out other brands I found the 7D not unlike the OM1 in that in manual mode the controls were very similar, the camera felt good a nice weight (I prefer a heavier camera) easy to locate and use controls, auto focusing was great ! I used it for all my work at home in the studio and out and about. The results were brilliant! getting used to knew things was a challenge (white balance, colour balance etc) but rewarding. Sadly Konica stopped producing camera's but fortunately Olympus' range had evolved and the new E3 arrived !
I did look at other brand names in camera's and read lots of reviews but once I actually went to try out the E3 i was hooked!
Follow the link to Olympus to see for yourself. It is again comfortable in your hands, just the right weight, easy controls, the menus at first are a bit daunting use the manual to navigate through them at first. The results are fantastic.
Follow the link to Olympus to see for yourself. It is again comfortable in your hands, just the right weight, easy controls, the menus at first are a bit daunting use the manual to navigate through them at first. The results are fantastic.
Why Olympus ? Because quite simply it is a fantastic camera, with practice you will get great results and I for one am not in anyway disappointed with the E3.
Buying a camera is very personal, go and try before you buy get a feel for it, read up on it, ask yourself what do you want from it.
Once you have one use it ! try out its features experiment, use it manually and really get to grips with your photography.
You are never to old to learn !!
